Thanks again for the time you took out of your day to stop by.

Wish you all the best on your industrial design endeavors.

The need is not always easy to find. It could be for a product not yet created or it could be for a feature on an existing product. Either way, it’s like answering a question.

Some products fail because they answer a question that isn’t being asked. Another reason products fail is because they answer the wrong question. And finally, sometimes products fail because they answer a trivial question.

(INSERT: noise of fortune cookie opening) The only way to create the perfect product (answer), is to find the perfect need (question).

Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.
-Charles Eames

But, what if we’re talking about a different resource altogether, specifically the unlimited supply of online information / design inspiration. Is there still a need to be responsible? Can you still consume too much? Well, there is only so many hours in a day. If you spend most your time consuming, you’ll never have enough time to create. Plus, I think it’s near impossible to do both at the same time.

We all know creating something unique takes time and a lot of effort. So, if you spend all your time consuming, all you’ll have at the end of the day is other people’s ideas. It’s very easy to “bite off” more then you can chew, there’s amazing work out there, but you’ll wear yourself out. Believe me.

So, the question is not whether you’ll deplete our open sourced collection of online knowledge. It’s, will you actually leave enough time in the day to sustain yourself as a designer?

(This post was written more for me, my Google Reader is out of control. It’s nuts! I’m committed to filtering it down… way down.)

Of course your reputation could be good or bad, but if you ignore/forget it you’ll come-off looking insincere. The consumer will usually think you don’t care. If you don’t fix the past, they will hate you back. Plus if you abandon what works, they’ll hate you for that too. They’ll leave thinking, “Why did you break it?”

We’re all anxious to chart new territory, to find some design or function that’s never been created, but building on a past reputation (bad/good) is almost more important. I think, many consumers are a little insecure about buying a new product. They wonder if it’ll work, if it’ll do the job it claims, if it’ll last, do they really need it, is it really better then the cheaper version. Building on something they know will help put those worries to rest.

It may even put a smile on their face.

(Image of Tiesto)

Industrial designers are stylists, engineers, inventors, and they’re creators, but a more uncommon label (and arguably most important) is orchestrator. An orchestrator creates music with elements, notes that existed before, yet they create something entirely unique and emotional. Designers are similar, they create objects and use materials that existed before. It’s not so much that you should create something that’s never been created, but organize something that’s never been organized.

Sure you may have engineers hating your draft angles, or management asking for a mm of change… Hello, you’re DESIGNING. You literally get to sketch the future.

If you’re not having fun, do something else! There’s plenty of other people that would love to step into your shoes.

I bet, you’ve heard many reasons why you shouldn’t blog, maybe even some of those reasons you made up yourself. Well, here’s a few reasons why you should.

1. Every designer should be a thought leader.
Your concepts are innovative and ground breaking. You have developed processes to execute new worlds of possibilities. Why aren’t you sharing them?

2. Blogging forces you to think things out.
Putting the pen to paper has always helped you clarify a design concept. That’s how we “work things out.” Picking a blog post topic, and stringing together a few sentences does the same thing.

3. It gives you a place to vent.
No, I don’t mean rant. Being an Industrial Designer doesn’t always mean you’ll be drawing hover boards, floating cars, and toasters that check your email. Writing a design article helps alleviate pent up design aggression, much like sketching on blue-sky-portfolio-projects.

4. It’ll keep you sharp.
Even without maintaining a blog, you should be reading and scouring the web, books, and magazines for the latest trends and tech. When you do have a blog, it encourages you to stay on the leading edge even more.

5. THE MOST IMPORTANT – A blog is the perfect place to start your Personal Brand (and I don’t mean a place to post your personal logo and portfolio). Personal Brand is so much more then a logo and few pretty pictures. Stay tuned for a whole blog post on this, but your brand is how others see/know you. Besides your portfolio and skill set, this is EVERYTHING. I’m not speaking to just students, either. I believe this is true for every Industrial Designer. Blogging, brings another level of depth to who you are and how you work.

What do you think? Is blogging for every Industrial Designer? If not, why?

About: An unbelievable service, and the level of professionalism and quality of work is amazing. Their one-line description is, “A free platform for the world’s leading creative professionals.” Behance was started by 99% a amazing site, focused on, “Making ideas happen.”

Features: Join groups/circles – Well formated display of portfolio – Tip Exchange from members – Job board – No limits on portfolio size.

Cost: Free, but you have to request an invite to join.

2. Coroflot

About: Coroflot could be considered THE place to host your Industrial Design portfolio. Total users on Coroflot is over 150,000. Even though they range from textiles to architects, there are over 900 Industrial Design users. A perfect place to network with some of the top designers in the world. Coroflot also provides a job board, and employer directory.

Features: Stats on profile and image views – Organize your portfolio into sets – Advertise on your site by creating badges – Network with friends – Job postings – Advise Blog

Cost: Free

3. Carbonmade

About: Carbonmade is a New York based company, and they know a little something about design. They offer different formats and styles to display your work.

Features: Dead simple signup – somewhat cool layouts to present your work

Cost: Free and Paid. Free gets you 5 projects and 35 images. Paid is $12/month and you get 50 projects with 500 images and 10 videos/flash. 12 bucks also allows you to have your own domain, with no ads, and ability to call them for help (tech support).

4. DeviantART

About: DeviantART has over 12 million artistic members. Create a profile, upload your work, and begin networking with a whole range of people. You can even sell your artwork.

Features: Galleries – Portfolio layout – Messaging/chatting – Critiques – Journal – Profile page (design wise, you could compare it to myspace) – Quality of work is all over the map

Cost: Free

5. Flavors.me

About: Allows anyone to create an elegant website using personal content from around the internet. If you have a blog, flicker, Facebook, and Linkedin accounts, and would like a central hub for them, Flavors.me is for you. It takes 5 minutes to set up and looks amazing.

Features: One place to coordinate all your online profiles.

Cost: Free

6. Facebook Profile and Fan Page

About: If you haven’t thought about it yet. You can create a photo album on your Facebook profile called Portfolio, then load as many images as you want. Many people set their profile privacy settings to private, which makes their photos hidden to the public. If that’s the case you can also create a fan page just for your portfolio. By nature, fan pages are public, and indexed by search engines.

Features: Access to a network of over 400 million people (obviously many of these are in high school, but still a great place to find and network with professionals)

Cost: Free

7. Shown’d

About: I haven’t tried Shown’d yet, but it looks great. They have a free demo, so you can try out the admin user interface without signing up. It seems easy. Although you can showcase your design projects, the ability for an Industrial Designer to network looks limited. Limited because there aren’t any id-ers using the service, or at least they don’t have a category for them.

Features: Excellent UI with drag and drop – Easy to setup – Job board – No limit to portfolio size

Cost: Free

8. Flickr

About: How can we forget Flickr? Or for that matter any photo sharing service. Flickr allows you to create galleries and share them as a great slideshow. Simple, straight forward, how could you possibly need anything else?

Features: Great organization – Slideshows – Huge database, that’s searched frequently – Simple

Cost: Free

9. Google Profile

About: Even though a Google Profile could be considered one of the most important (accounts to have), to many this feature is still a secret. It’s much like Flavors.me. It allows you to link out to all of your online accounts. The main benefit comes when someone searches for your name. Bingo, you show up on the first page (although at the bottom). Setting one up is easy, if you have a Google account, you’re halfway there. Once you’re logged in, click on Settings in the top right corner. Then click Google Account Settings, and then Create a Profile (next to the crazy smiley face). Be sure to add your Flickr/Picasa portfolio, and ta-da your portfolio will show up on the first page (if anyone searches your name).

Features: Central hub for your online accounts – Bio area – Add your portfolio via Flickr/Picasa – Show up first on SERP – Google – Google – and did I mention Google

Cost: Free

Did I miss one? Give me a suggestion for number 10.

My current setup looks like this:

1. iPhone

2. Macbook Pro

3. Monitor, keyboard, and mouse

It’s worked great for me, but there are a few drawbacks:

1. While it’s convenient to check email on my iPhone, I hate writing emails on it. So, most emails end up being one or two sentences.

2. Browsing the internet anywhere on my iPhone is fun, but also not ideal. It’s way too small.

3. Reading books, watching movies, and playing games is also fun on the iPhone, but it’s still too small.

4. Lugging my laptop around, although portable, is a pain.

5. My laptop is great for having some computing power in “portable mode”, but it’s still not powerful enough to work in “power-user mode” (working with large amounts of video, and high-res photos).

That’s why I could see my future setup looking more like this:

1. iPhone (maybe not, this could be a cheap flip phone)

2. iPad (still not a big fan of the name)

3. Mac Pro

I’ll have the computing power when I need it, and better usability when out-in-about.

Maybe, I just rationalized spending more money, when I really don’t need to.

How about you, do you see this product fitting in your line-up?

Sometimes entertainment is just plain awe-inspiring.

Why not shoot for that?

I love this video by the creative geniuses, OK Go. Yesterday it had been watched by 300,000. Today it’s views are over a million.

Maybe awe-inspiring works.